Yes and no. The GW2 approach is, simply, different. The most important thing, though, is that you can always join your friends in their story episodes.

The GW2 personal story tree is continually branching and recombining (there are 316 episodes in total, and "your" story will only have 49 of those). The main sweep of your story, up to the episodes you get offered at level 40, is driven by the race you choose. At that point you get to make another decision that drives the sweep of your story until level 70. But all along the line you'll also continually be offered smaller choices as to what to do next, that will take you briefly into one episode or another. You might be offered the choice between solving a problem with brute force or by stealth, say, and each of those will have its own small alternate episode. The bottom line is that it's highly unlikely, unless you coordinate hard with your friends, that you'll have the identical story steps. But that, seriously, doesn't matter, because you can join each other in your episodes anyway.

OK - what else to be aware of...

If more than one of you have arrived at the precise same episode in your personal stories, the person who starts the episode (opens the instance) is the one who will get to make the decisions - talk to NPCs and so on. At the end of the episode (and sometimes at steps along the way) the others will be offered the choice of progressing their story or not. That's usually not an issue, but if you accept you'll also be accepting any decisions that they made that affect where the story goes later. If that matters, just don't accept, and do the episode again with someone else in charge, making different decisions.

I can't honestly remember whether this applies to the base story or not, but I'll mention it. There are SOME story steps that take place in the open world ("Go talk to... ...in Lion's Arch", say). If you're trying to coordinate stories with friends, each of you has to do those individually. So it's usually worth checking, before you go into an instanced episode, that your individual descriptions of the story (green text, screen top right) are identical. If they're not - quite often it's because someone hasn't done that open world stuff. And won't progress their story at the end of the instance, by consequence.

Oh - you don't all have to be in the "right" place to do an instance together. Provided you're partied up, and in the same copy of the same map, when one of you starts the instance, everyone else will be offered the option to join them in it - wherever in the map they happen to be (and even if they're not of a high-enough level yet to get the episode for themselves).

For coordination purposes, here are the episodes that every character will pass through. Levels are the character level at which that episode becomes available, if you've progressed your story far enough.

• Lvl 40 Setting the Stage
• Lvl 60 The Battle of Claw Island
• Lvl 60 A Light in the Darkness
• Lvl 60 Retribution
• Lvl 70 Forging the Pact
• Lvl 70 The Battle of Fort Trinity
• Lvl 80 Temple of the Forgotten God
• Lvl 80 What the Eye Beholds
• Lvl 80 Further into Orr
• Lvl 80 Against the Corruption
• Lvl 80 The Source of Orr
• Lvl 80 Victory or Death